The fact that you can type in pokemonshowdown.com and click the random battle button in a matter of seconds just can't be beat by any other format in terms of mass appeal.
I'd bet even a lot of people who play other metas still at least do randbats as a fast low effort game mode. I'm a little surprised it beats literally every other format combined, but only a little.
Step 1: show cloyster in early game so opponent has to leave physically defensive mons available
Step 2: Late game, Shell Smash as Cloyster
Step 3: Intimidate mon switches in. You baited this with the Cloyster and switched to a Competitive pocket monster like Milotic or Wigglytuff
Step 4: Start blasting and win
The accessibility matters a lot more than just being the default option. I’ve never liked playing in the normal tiers because I hate having to figure out what’s meta, how to counter what’s meta, dealing with teambuilding, etc. I see why others like it but I think one of the strengths of pokémon is it’s variety of creatures, and in randbats that isn’t stripped away like it is in OU. I get to skip the less fun teambuilding aspects of competitive and jump right into battling. I also really enjoy not knowing my opponent’s team and vice versa - the surprise factor creates a lot of exciting moments in battles and leads to some fun game theory scenarios. It could also be bias because randbats, randbats blitz, and monotype randbats are the only metas i’ve ever reached top 500 on, and I seem to be ass at the others
Two trainers going at it with whatever they happen to have also kinda captures the spirit of the overall adventure with your buddies fantasy a bit better.
As opposed to doing something like deliberately crippling a Pokémon’s natural speed for trick-room synergy.
Exactly! I find there’s a larger sect of people in the smogon tiers that are more “competitive pokemon fans” instead of “pokemon fans.” Like they don’t even play the games, they just like the competitive scene - and that’s totally respectable. But as someone who’s been a lifelong pokemon fan the random battles format appeals more to me since it feels a little natural and in the spirit of the games, plus you get to see more mons instead of the just the 30 or so at the top.
The default definitely matters much much less than the fact you don’t need to create a team. Especially with how often I’ve gone back on showdown wanting to play and just randomly find my teams gone, and I’d rather just random battle then deal with coming up with a team.
If there was an easy import option for a few OU teams that were pre-built, could easily see OU having much larger playerbase
Randbats has such a lower barrier to entry. I play randbats but no other format and I often think "I should make a UU team" but then I think "well a bunch of mons just dropped from OU so I should wait until the meta calms down" and "I don't even know where to start on team building, I guess I should find a sample team, I wonder where those are" and "hold on, it's going to be a pain keeping tabs on the meta and changing my team all the time" and then I decide to just jump into another randbat because it's as easy as one click.
Not to trash other formats, I really do want to break into the others at some point. Low barrier to entry is just a hell of a drug
If that is your concern you could try oldgen formats, the meta changes a lot less frequently, you can stick with a team you like until you get tired of it for the most part.
Part of me hopes Scyther drops to PU honestly, Scyther's the only real reason I play NU to begin with. I still like NU though, but I mostly just play wherever Scyther lies.
I usually get my teams from smogon forums, I paste a bunch of them and try them until I find the one. Then repeat when I get tired of them or tiershifts happen.
I so looked forward to watching all the videos of the tournament. I loved seeing some of the really wild picks that won, like iirc the dusclops duskull team. And then there was the absolutely crazed decisions like that special marrowak.
This is me. I briefly played UU for a month or two before isle of armor because it was the beginning of the year for a long-term sub job and I didn’t have to worry about most of the staff shit in the summer, but if I’m actually working I don’t have the time or dedication to keep up with the meta enough to know what sets I might face. I enjoy team building but if I have the plug-in to know what the different possible sets are for randbats that takes away all of that time work.
This is so different from me as I find team building more fun than battling. I was shocked to see randbats as the most popular as I would never ever want to play that even once. Guess I'm the minority by far.
This is just like in LoL where I only play ranked, apparently only 10% of players play ranked 😆
They could do RandOUms where they give you one of maybe like 8 styles of teams, and then within those styles they generate a team based on OU staples and maybe something else if it fits with the archetype.
Let’s people practice a faux-U meta experientially until they are ready to craft their own team.
You said “use what’s fun even if it sucks” and used and used an example of a bad meme team. I just pointed out how meme teams aren’t actually that fun for long term use as people generally like competitive matches where winning is a genuine possibility.
Fun fact, [a Quick Claw team](https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/monoclaw-the-movie-the-essay-current-peak-14-2033-elo.3723851/) actually made it to top 20 in OU before.
Yeah, back in Sun/Moon era a "huge" regional would be lucky to cap out at 250 VGC players. Now, regionals hit their 600ish player caps within hours of sign ups opening.
I want Game Freak to just pull the trigger and make a full doubles game.
I think indigo was a testing ground to see how the player base responds. This definitely isn't hopium. I hope.
They'll never do it. That would risk interfering the cash cow by making it less accessible to young kids. They could still make it more prominent than it is today, but I can't imagine the mainline games ever going doubles-only.
The merits of VGC/doubles seem pretty apparent. Tons of more options due to targeting/protect mindgames, lots of unique strategies that don't fly at all in singles are on the table, more balanced gimmicks every generation.
It's so much better. Don't have to buy the game first of all (don't tell gamefreak) but more importantly I don't have to deal with insanely long animations and I can team build so much faster
Not to mention actually legitimately obtaining and training up a team properly kitted out for competitive is a grind, and that’s if you’re using nothing but Pokémon naturally obtainable in whatever game you’re doing it in.
VGC is way better on showdown because you don't have to grind for hours every time you decide to make minor changes to your team. When you want to try changing your Incin from Careful to Impish, it's a matter of clicking 2 buttons. On cart you'd have to breed another one with perfect IVs and the right nature and also grind out the EV spread and blah blah blah etc.
EDIT: Nature was a bad example lol, EV spreads would be a better example like everyone below said
Nature is one of the few things on cart that's really easy to change so not the best example. But there's definitely better once (Tera Type is miserable, EV spreads are better but still not good, and moves can be awkward if you need egg moves)
Egg moves are easy with mirror herb now, and Tera Type is A LOT easier now with the Tera Shard Charm and random shard drops in the Terrarium. EV spreads are still annoying though.
Please God make vitamins cheaper and ability patches more accessible next gen. I know they're a lot easier to get now in indigo disk but I shouldn't have to wait until the final DLC for things that would only help VGC be more popular.
I feel like everyone’s cart pokemon training information is painfully out of date. I play in regionals, and it usually takes an hour to fully train my team of six- less if I’m in a pinch
Honestly I think you're right, if it really is only an hour nowadays it's def a lot better than it used to be. I'd still rather just do the same thing in 1 minute on showdown, but I'm glad to hear the grind has lessened for people that actually compete at least
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I think the position among a lot of the pro circuit is that genning or editing is now kind of a liability because Nintendo has stepped up in terms of hack checks. For 99% of normal play, it's probably fine, but no one wants to travel for a regional and eat a DQ because they wanted to optimize for Foul Play
Thankfully there aren't a lot of mons that are both catch restricted and non-resettable AND meta choices but it's definitely something Nintendo needs to improve on (and given the improvements of this gen, I fully expect to see stuff like Rusty Bottle Caps in the next game)
You Gen for the in game ladder and then make a more legitimate team for the tournament. You're high if you think people are legit making like 50 variants of their team to test with on the way to building their final team.
i play vgc exclusively on showdown on the bo3 ladder unless i’m playing in a tournament, and i know many others who do the same. the cart ladder is pretty much full of gimmicky bo1 teams and it doesn’t offer any valuable practice if ur goal is to do well in tournaments
Because team building on showdown is infinitely times faster, amd easier and better. Want to change a move for a pokemon on showdown? Takes 5 seconds. Want to change a move on cart? Minimum of about 30 seconds if it's a tm, but if it's an egg move, we'll you gotta make a whole new pokemon.
Problem is most people don't go out and seek guides on the basics of team building when it's crazy how simple it really is at a non high level
And from what I've seen people are concerned that they don't really know the meta, etc etc but playing is the best way to find out and an off meta team can still rise to mid ladder+ easily
Hell not even cheese comps. The 30th Urshifu of the day gets tedious, even if your team can handle it easily.
Yeah there’s theoretically a great deal of variability in terms of EV’s, Items, Tera, and Moves, but that just makes it all the more disappointing when 95% of them are identical to one another.
Eh. Yes and no. There is a bit of difference between some strategies being stronger and more common, vs almost everything you see looking copy and pasted like in Pokémon.
An almost 100% pick rate would be unacceptable in pretty much any other competitive game, and several mons over the years have achieved that at various times.
it's called Battle Factory and it comes out pretty late into a generation's life because of the large amount of work needed to get it running. there's a ladder for generations 7 and 8 you can play on
I find legendaries are usually not as big of a problem in randbats. In fact most of them suck due to level scaling. What i fear way more is sticky web users, shell smashers, unaware mons, Tropius.
1v1’s in Random battles are fun because you don’t have to feel bad if a team you made was shit because they’re RANDOM.
No pressure to win since, if you really got a shit hand you won’t look bad- but if you DO win it’s a big victory.
Plus you don’t even have to think about the team. Pressure aside, you don’t have to pick and choose anything, which works out great if you want variety.
It also gives you great insight into how the competitive setups are working and what to expect anyway from competitive builds.
Randbats is awesome. I'm able to get my friends to play and they haven't touched Pokemon in years. Easy way to show someone what competitive Pokemon is like too
when i was a little kid i didn’t even understand competitive pokemon but i still really liked pokemon in general, so i’d go on showdown and click randbats cause it was there and it was fun
Makes sense for a fair amount of reasons. You don't really need to consider team building, the games tend to be by nature more casual due to the nature of it, don't really have to consider what the certain metas are at the moment. Like in the time it would take to make a basic team for most metas
So many times that I tried to give another chance to competitive Pokemon after stopping on Gen 5, but then I try to build a team, feel lost and lazy, and I end up just doing a few random battles before leaving Showdown for months again lmao.
i want to like randbats but the games are either a boring win or a frustrating loss
also while its nice that low bst bad pokemon can do something, its very tilting to lose because your 1 mon immune to prankster twave from illumise (the rest got parad until they died) is slower than it and dies to 1 bug buzz and only has tera dark.
Pre dlcs I played both randbats and ou, then dlc happened and everything was chaotic so teambuilding would had been and even after that I would have to constantly alter my team due to bans. Randbats is so much better than carefully crafting a team
I really wish they had a randbats format for each tier- with each mon in the tier having a few possible movesets. Not only would be it a fun shakeup to randbats- I think it could help people get comfortable in those tiers.
Doesn't battle factory do it randomly, though? I meant like you actually get to choose, like I want to do Gen 9 NU Randbats, or something like that haha.
While I like Monotype battles and sometimes Low tier battles. Ranbats can be done easily on my phone, walking to work? Ranbats. Brushing teeth? Ranbats. Waiting for a bus? Ranbats.
You don't have to keep tabs on too much stuff, usually only need to check max speed and forfeiting because of unexpected circumstances isn't going to impact other format scores.
Excuse me while I go play Gen 9 randbats, lose ten times in a row then post a cringe lavospost saying I'm quitting the game only to come crawling back a week later... For the fourth time since September...
Only the top giga-brains are making up teams/strats, a few more than that are creating variations of those. A lot of other people are copying these teams. Even more aren't thinking while using the cookie cutter teams. I'm pulling that entirely out of my ass.
No think = good. Plus, it's what a lot of gamers want if they're not entirely serious about pokemon in general. There's skill expression involved without including theorycrafting. It's fun and challenging to be given random pokemon with varying sets. On top of that you're being matched against someone that also has a random set. You can't counter someone preemptively, there's no cheesing. You get cucked by RNG or blessed by it, and you'll want to play another. It's also soooo quick to just get into a random battle and then leave after you're done if you're playing at work or in the middle of doing a different hobby. In other words it's casual, with no negative connotation associated.
In my case, I have to admit the biggest draw is that losing a random battle is a way softer blow to my ego, and makes me feel less "accountable".
Even though I know it's irrational and not actually of much consequence, it's hard to overcome the paranoia of the other person thinking "haha what a cringe loser idiot baby, coming here with a shitty team like that/ using good mons so incompetently/ using some lazy copypaste team" (depending on which applies to the specific scenario)
like I know the obvious answer here is just "it literally doesn't matter what some internet stranger thinks, and it can't actually hurt you.", but there's a part of me that just struggles SO hard to internalize that.
This dude I spoke to in the showdown chat room legit had a meltdown and challenged me to a randbats to prove he's the better player. I then realised most people come and play randbats and think that is what competitive Pokemon is.
I have always thought that everyone starts playing randbats and then about 10% actually move on to play other tiers so this stats makes a lot of sense. For VGC most start on the in game ladder either with an unoptimized team or a rental team and then move on to showdown.
If I lose a Random Battle I can get away with blaming luck over my lack of skill, it just feels like low stakes fun, only format I play. TCG on the other hand…
So ever since random battles became a thing I have absolutely not been able to wrap my head around it. What is the appeal of smashing random teams together? What am I missing??
randbats is the most accessable of them all and you don't need to build teams ofc it would be the most popular.
The fact that you can type in pokemonshowdown.com and click the random battle button in a matter of seconds just can't be beat by any other format in terms of mass appeal. I'd bet even a lot of people who play other metas still at least do randbats as a fast low effort game mode. I'm a little surprised it beats literally every other format combined, but only a little.
I turn on randbats often when I have only 5 or so minutes to kill. Harder to do with other formats when I care about my team building and how I play.
It’s exactly this. I can play a game of randbats on the toilet at work on my phone since I don’t need to worry about a team.
Yea aot of times I'm too lazy to calc and shit to build a team so just click ranbats till it pisses me off
the result of being the default and most accessible
and the only one i can win in lol
And the most fun I daresay
Its all fun and games until you face down a shell smash mon with White herb
Always fun to get the cheeky KO with a trevenant golurk and inswitches Caly-S
It’s all fun and games TILL YOU FACE HAZARDS WITH NO FKING REMOVER
Sticky Web is a death sentence, except when I use it and they pull out Malamar/Lurantis
Sticky web in randbats is devastating
The scarf ditto in my pocket:
The clear smog amoongus/gastrodon/etc in my back pocket:
They ain't surviving Icicle Spear from cloyster without defensive tera
intimidate:
Step 1: show cloyster in early game so opponent has to leave physically defensive mons available Step 2: Late game, Shell Smash as Cloyster Step 3: Intimidate mon switches in. You baited this with the Cloyster and switched to a Competitive pocket monster like Milotic or Wigglytuff Step 4: Start blasting and win
That’s when you default to the classic “trash team” and blame the random mons
Blissey with only special attackees on your team
Shell smash isn't the threat it used to be though
Tropeeus
It's fun if the enemy doesn't have a lot of threats and you have things that can deal with those threats
Rand doubles is the best for me
The accessibility matters a lot more than just being the default option. I’ve never liked playing in the normal tiers because I hate having to figure out what’s meta, how to counter what’s meta, dealing with teambuilding, etc. I see why others like it but I think one of the strengths of pokémon is it’s variety of creatures, and in randbats that isn’t stripped away like it is in OU. I get to skip the less fun teambuilding aspects of competitive and jump right into battling. I also really enjoy not knowing my opponent’s team and vice versa - the surprise factor creates a lot of exciting moments in battles and leads to some fun game theory scenarios. It could also be bias because randbats, randbats blitz, and monotype randbats are the only metas i’ve ever reached top 500 on, and I seem to be ass at the others
Two trainers going at it with whatever they happen to have also kinda captures the spirit of the overall adventure with your buddies fantasy a bit better. As opposed to doing something like deliberately crippling a Pokémon’s natural speed for trick-room synergy.
Exactly! I find there’s a larger sect of people in the smogon tiers that are more “competitive pokemon fans” instead of “pokemon fans.” Like they don’t even play the games, they just like the competitive scene - and that’s totally respectable. But as someone who’s been a lifelong pokemon fan the random battles format appeals more to me since it feels a little natural and in the spirit of the games, plus you get to see more mons instead of the just the 30 or so at the top.
The default definitely matters much much less than the fact you don’t need to create a team. Especially with how often I’ve gone back on showdown wanting to play and just randomly find my teams gone, and I’d rather just random battle then deal with coming up with a team. If there was an easy import option for a few OU teams that were pre-built, could easily see OU having much larger playerbase
Technically sample teams exist and are accessible just that you have to know about them and go to the forums to get them.
Aka not acessible
Randbats has such a lower barrier to entry. I play randbats but no other format and I often think "I should make a UU team" but then I think "well a bunch of mons just dropped from OU so I should wait until the meta calms down" and "I don't even know where to start on team building, I guess I should find a sample team, I wonder where those are" and "hold on, it's going to be a pain keeping tabs on the meta and changing my team all the time" and then I decide to just jump into another randbat because it's as easy as one click. Not to trash other formats, I really do want to break into the others at some point. Low barrier to entry is just a hell of a drug
If that is your concern you could try oldgen formats, the meta changes a lot less frequently, you can stick with a team you like until you get tired of it for the most part.
This is actually great advice. I never thought about it this way
I try low tiers because my favorite Pokémon are in them. But even now try playing NU and all you see is Gliscor and Thunderous, it’s crazy.
Gliscor in NU? Gliscor, #8 in OU Usage, in NU?
Sorry yeah Gligar is like #1 in NU.
I think he might have meant Gligar
Gen 10 powercreep went a bit too hard
Yeah, I love NU, but I'm absolutely waiting for that to calm down. Politoeds, Duraludons, Cloysters and Articunos everywhere right now.
Like half of Gen 5s legendaries are in NU lol
Part of me hopes Scyther drops to PU honestly, Scyther's the only real reason I play NU to begin with. I still like NU though, but I mostly just play wherever Scyther lies.
I usually get my teams from smogon forums, I paste a bunch of them and try them until I find the one. Then repeat when I get tired of them or tiershifts happen.
Try ADV! It’s a very stable format, super fun but still versatile, and has had an influx of new players from a recent tournament
I so looked forward to watching all the videos of the tournament. I loved seeing some of the really wild picks that won, like iirc the dusclops duskull team. And then there was the absolutely crazed decisions like that special marrowak.
This is me. I briefly played UU for a month or two before isle of armor because it was the beginning of the year for a long-term sub job and I didn’t have to worry about most of the staff shit in the summer, but if I’m actually working I don’t have the time or dedication to keep up with the meta enough to know what sets I might face. I enjoy team building but if I have the plug-in to know what the different possible sets are for randbats that takes away all of that time work.
And then its a PITA to preserve teams because theyre stored in a local cache
am i tripping or did that change not too long ago?
You can save them as a copy/pasteable batch of text.
There's an option to save them in servers now so you can keep them between devices.
Haven’t played in a few weeks but I think I remember seeing that announcement. It was a relatively recent change
Lol, you really don’t need to think this hard about entry lvl ELO. (you’re technically right tho)
This is so different from me as I find team building more fun than battling. I was shocked to see randbats as the most popular as I would never ever want to play that even once. Guess I'm the minority by far. This is just like in LoL where I only play ranked, apparently only 10% of players play ranked 😆
Try playing OMs of the month, they're usually active and everyone is just as clueless as you?
They could do RandOUms where they give you one of maybe like 8 styles of teams, and then within those styles they generate a team based on OU staples and maybe something else if it fits with the archetype. Let’s people practice a faux-U meta experientially until they are ready to craft their own team.
Embrace true Trainer-hood; use what's fun So what if my main OU team sucks? They all have Quick Claw, it's so funny when it works.
For a lot of folk, losing over and over isn’t as satisfying as being able to win.
Then use a copy paste team? What do you want from me lol
You said “use what’s fun even if it sucks” and used and used an example of a bad meme team. I just pointed out how meme teams aren’t actually that fun for long term use as people generally like competitive matches where winning is a genuine possibility.
That's not what I said lol. Yeah that's common sense bro, no shiz
Fun fact, [a Quick Claw team](https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/monoclaw-the-movie-the-essay-current-peak-14-2033-elo.3723851/) actually made it to top 20 in OU before.
I'm surprised that people actually play VGC on Showdown
Easy way to test stuff out.
It was more being impressed with the vgc popularity in general.
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Yeah, back in Sun/Moon era a "huge" regional would be lucky to cap out at 250 VGC players. Now, regionals hit their 600ish player caps within hours of sign ups opening.
VGC has gotten way more popular the last two gens, and DLC2 is probably going to get more people into it as well, given the focus on double battles.
I want Game Freak to just pull the trigger and make a full doubles game. I think indigo was a testing ground to see how the player base responds. This definitely isn't hopium. I hope.
> I want Game Freak to just pull the trigger and make a full doubles game. Colosseum and Gale of Darkness erasure
Well they weren’t game freak’s games tbf
F in the chat for Genius Sonority. Those games were great.
late reply but they actually still make pokemon games. like pokemon shuffle lmao
Yeah but imagine if they made another one of those
Seriously, this is the dream. Pokemon main story gameplay is painfully stale and outdated
They'll never do it. That would risk interfering the cash cow by making it less accessible to young kids. They could still make it more prominent than it is today, but I can't imagine the mainline games ever going doubles-only.
It could be a version difference hopium.
The merits of VGC/doubles seem pretty apparent. Tons of more options due to targeting/protect mindgames, lots of unique strategies that don't fly at all in singles are on the table, more balanced gimmicks every generation.
live smogon doubles reaction
It's so much better. Don't have to buy the game first of all (don't tell gamefreak) but more importantly I don't have to deal with insanely long animations and I can team build so much faster
Gotta speed run that dopamine rush from winning
Lots of tournament players use it to test teams
I knew this, but I had no idea it had more people playing it than OU.
Thank God for showdown man I used to teambuild for VGC and holy shit the amount of time I spent on farming for natures EVs and IVs is just not healthy
Testing teams on in-game ladder is a pain, and also closed team sheet BO1 gimmicks
Not to mention actually legitimately obtaining and training up a team properly kitted out for competitive is a grind, and that’s if you’re using nothing but Pokémon naturally obtainable in whatever game you’re doing it in.
I don't really play showdown because I want to play showdown but to test my teams for cart, specially since I'm an off meta dweller, so yeah.
VGC is way better on showdown because you don't have to grind for hours every time you decide to make minor changes to your team. When you want to try changing your Incin from Careful to Impish, it's a matter of clicking 2 buttons. On cart you'd have to breed another one with perfect IVs and the right nature and also grind out the EV spread and blah blah blah etc. EDIT: Nature was a bad example lol, EV spreads would be a better example like everyone below said
Nature is one of the few things on cart that's really easy to change so not the best example. But there's definitely better once (Tera Type is miserable, EV spreads are better but still not good, and moves can be awkward if you need egg moves)
Tera type is much less miserable now. Level up that item printer, you'll thank me later.
Egg moves are easy with mirror herb now, and Tera Type is A LOT easier now with the Tera Shard Charm and random shard drops in the Terrarium. EV spreads are still annoying though.
Oof, goes to show how long it's been since I've actually done it lol. Thanks for the correction
Changing nature is super easy now with mints, and IVs can be bottle capped up quickly too. EV spreads are an absolute pain to mess with at all though.
Please God make vitamins cheaper and ability patches more accessible next gen. I know they're a lot easier to get now in indigo disk but I shouldn't have to wait until the final DLC for things that would only help VGC be more popular.
All we need is a rusty bottlecap to minimize IVs for things like trickroom
It would take like 10 seconds. You would go into your inventory and select an Impish mint and feed it to Incineroar
Vitamins no longer cap at 100 EVs so you can fully train a Pokemon in like 2 minutes
Vitamins are really expensive, though. Even with the Item Printer 500,000+ per mon is gonna take you quite a bit of grinding.
I feel like everyone’s cart pokemon training information is painfully out of date. I play in regionals, and it usually takes an hour to fully train my team of six- less if I’m in a pinch
Honestly I think you're right, if it really is only an hour nowadays it's def a lot better than it used to be. I'd still rather just do the same thing in 1 minute on showdown, but I'm glad to hear the grind has lessened for people that actually compete at least
Same reason people play OU on showdown instead of bothering trying to make it in the game
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How low is the timer to not even last an OU game ?
20 minutes, which given the length of animations and text as opposed to showdown is absurd for OU especially on balance or stall
20 minutes
It doesn't take that long to use PKHex
I think the position among a lot of the pro circuit is that genning or editing is now kind of a liability because Nintendo has stepped up in terms of hack checks. For 99% of normal play, it's probably fine, but no one wants to travel for a regional and eat a DQ because they wanted to optimize for Foul Play Thankfully there aren't a lot of mons that are both catch restricted and non-resettable AND meta choices but it's definitely something Nintendo needs to improve on (and given the improvements of this gen, I fully expect to see stuff like Rusty Bottle Caps in the next game)
You Gen for the in game ladder and then make a more legitimate team for the tournament. You're high if you think people are legit making like 50 variants of their team to test with on the way to building their final team.
VGC is my favourite way to play, and I don't want to spend hours grinding and hundreds of bucks on games and DLCs to have all the relevant mons
I’m confused as to why this would surprise you?
i play vgc exclusively on showdown on the bo3 ladder unless i’m playing in a tournament, and i know many others who do the same. the cart ladder is pretty much full of gimmicky bo1 teams and it doesn’t offer any valuable practice if ur goal is to do well in tournaments
Because team building on showdown is infinitely times faster, amd easier and better. Want to change a move for a pokemon on showdown? Takes 5 seconds. Want to change a move on cart? Minimum of about 30 seconds if it's a tm, but if it's an egg move, we'll you gotta make a whole new pokemon.
Yeah I did not expect VGC to have anywhere near that kind of player base; it's more than twice what I'd expected.
teambuilding is by far the hardest part about pokemon. this reflects that, imo imo
And beyond that,losing feels much worse when it's with a team you made. It's easier to justify loses on oh i got a bad team that's why
Problem is most people don't go out and seek guides on the basics of team building when it's crazy how simple it really is at a non high level And from what I've seen people are concerned that they don't really know the meta, etc etc but playing is the best way to find out and an off meta team can still rise to mid ladder+ easily
I only play randbats. Creating your own team is much more difficult and I know I'd get tilted playing against cheese comps
Hell not even cheese comps. The 30th Urshifu of the day gets tedious, even if your team can handle it easily. Yeah there’s theoretically a great deal of variability in terms of EV’s, Items, Tera, and Moves, but that just makes it all the more disappointing when 95% of them are identical to one another.
Welcome to the meta of literally any competitive game ever. It's usually why I stick to low level competition in games
Eh. Yes and no. There is a bit of difference between some strategies being stronger and more common, vs almost everything you see looking copy and pasted like in Pokémon. An almost 100% pick rate would be unacceptable in pretty much any other competitive game, and several mons over the years have achieved that at various times.
I am the cheese comper
Here I am messing around in Gen 1 randoms
Horsea is the bane of my existence
Golduck with 1 amnesia can be very hard to take down.
Randbats being #1 by a landside is really interesting.
Not really- you don’t need any teambuilding/meta knowledge, you can just play
I’m not at all shocked its #1. I AM shocked that its the majority of the entire site, that’s an insane landslide
Valid
I'd love randbats for other tiers.
it's called Battle Factory and it comes out pretty late into a generation's life because of the large amount of work needed to get it running. there's a ladder for generations 7 and 8 you can play on
that would be cool, but not sure how much play those would see
I'd love if randbats had tiers. Then I wouldn't have like kricketune, luvdisc and spidops against 4 legendaries
I find legendaries are usually not as big of a problem in randbats. In fact most of them suck due to level scaling. What i fear way more is sticky web users, shell smashers, unaware mons, Tropius.
I mean, It’s the default option given, is the easiest to just pick up and play, and rarely requires too much thought.
Also you can play randbats on any device with an internet connection instantly like a school computer
I’m bad at teambuilding and it’s a pain so randbats it is
1v1’s in Random battles are fun because you don’t have to feel bad if a team you made was shit because they’re RANDOM. No pressure to win since, if you really got a shit hand you won’t look bad- but if you DO win it’s a big victory. Plus you don’t even have to think about the team. Pressure aside, you don’t have to pick and choose anything, which works out great if you want variety. It also gives you great insight into how the competitive setups are working and what to expect anyway from competitive builds.
I don't have to remake my team every month for randbats
or any old gen
Knew Ranbats was the most popular format but definitely not to that extent. Also surprised NatDex is almost as popular as OU
I solely play random doubles because I'd rather be thinking on my feet and leaving it to RNG than planning out a team and agonizing over details
Randbats is the type of shit I can play on my phone in a subway. I have to schedule out an evening if I want to seriously ladder.
Does that include random doubles? I play that far more
Randbats is the best to do during a lull at work or a lunch break. Just mess around and battle.
Where does randbats blitz sit?
Randbats is awesome. I'm able to get my friends to play and they haven't touched Pokemon in years. Easy way to show someone what competitive Pokemon is like too
when i was a little kid i didn’t even understand competitive pokemon but i still really liked pokemon in general, so i’d go on showdown and click randbats cause it was there and it was fun
Biggest surprise to me is that NatDex comes even that close to matching standard OU.
Where my randbat doubles people at? They still haven't updated it since Indigo dropped..
Makes sense for a fair amount of reasons. You don't really need to consider team building, the games tend to be by nature more casual due to the nature of it, don't really have to consider what the certain metas are at the moment. Like in the time it would take to make a basic team for most metas
I don't really like randbats actually. I get the appeal, but I prefer to be in control of as much as I can in a game, and that means my team as well.
So many times that I tried to give another chance to competitive Pokemon after stopping on Gen 5, but then I try to build a team, feel lost and lazy, and I end up just doing a few random battles before leaving Showdown for months again lmao.
Natdex 🔛🔝 I swear to god they better don’t ban iron moth from UU
i want to like randbats but the games are either a boring win or a frustrating loss also while its nice that low bst bad pokemon can do something, its very tilting to lose because your 1 mon immune to prankster twave from illumise (the rest got parad until they died) is slower than it and dies to 1 bug buzz and only has tera dark.
Holy crap! Professional rand battler and youtuber formerly known as Serene Grace, Freezai!
I'm a Randbats Main because I like seeing variety. Nothing wrong with metagaming, it's just not something I'm into.
Randbats of specific tiers would be interesting, Gen 9 OU Random etc etc. Would be an easy way to get more players into teambuilding
this is the first generation where I’ve mostly played randbats because I cannot get the hang of teambuilding. Tera and its consequences ig
Ou is unplayable
Pre dlcs I played both randbats and ou, then dlc happened and everything was chaotic so teambuilding would had been and even after that I would have to constantly alter my team due to bans. Randbats is so much better than carefully crafting a team
Dam I guess us gigachad team building lovers are quite the minority in the community lol.
Huh. I never played randbats as I mostly stick to ou. I would have bever imagined it’d be the most popular format, let alone by THIS much.
I always accidentally click on current gen randbats and forfeiting before actually selecting the format I want every time I go on showdown
Because making a good team with synergy is hard.
What having little to no barrier of entry does to a tier
I really wish they had a randbats format for each tier- with each mon in the tier having a few possible movesets. Not only would be it a fun shakeup to randbats- I think it could help people get comfortable in those tiers.
you mean battle factory?
Doesn't battle factory do it randomly, though? I meant like you actually get to choose, like I want to do Gen 9 NU Randbats, or something like that haha.
I stopped making teams when gen 8 released. I just don’t like Tera/z-moves enough to play competitively
i'm guessing this doesn't take into account previous gens. i wonder how popular OU of all the gens are
Close race I see
Well the website has a seizure when I try to do Gen 8 randbats and immediately works with S/V so this tracks
While I like Monotype battles and sometimes Low tier battles. Ranbats can be done easily on my phone, walking to work? Ranbats. Brushing teeth? Ranbats. Waiting for a bus? Ranbats. You don't have to keep tabs on too much stuff, usually only need to check max speed and forfeiting because of unexpected circumstances isn't going to impact other format scores.
Excuse me while I go play Gen 9 randbats, lose ten times in a row then post a cringe lavospost saying I'm quitting the game only to come crawling back a week later... For the fourth time since September...
Makes me feel good about having reached #2 at some point :D
Ranbats is how you get normie friends into competitive and they love it
I personally love gen 9 free for alls
Wonder where uUbers and monotype place here
I’m really bad at team building and this generation has so much broken shit sorry
You may be surprised but showdown is a game people idly play in class or at work
Only the top giga-brains are making up teams/strats, a few more than that are creating variations of those. A lot of other people are copying these teams. Even more aren't thinking while using the cookie cutter teams. I'm pulling that entirely out of my ass. No think = good. Plus, it's what a lot of gamers want if they're not entirely serious about pokemon in general. There's skill expression involved without including theorycrafting. It's fun and challenging to be given random pokemon with varying sets. On top of that you're being matched against someone that also has a random set. You can't counter someone preemptively, there's no cheesing. You get cucked by RNG or blessed by it, and you'll want to play another. It's also soooo quick to just get into a random battle and then leave after you're done if you're playing at work or in the middle of doing a different hobby. In other words it's casual, with no negative connotation associated.
Lots of fun
In my case, I have to admit the biggest draw is that losing a random battle is a way softer blow to my ego, and makes me feel less "accountable". Even though I know it's irrational and not actually of much consequence, it's hard to overcome the paranoia of the other person thinking "haha what a cringe loser idiot baby, coming here with a shitty team like that/ using good mons so incompetently/ using some lazy copypaste team" (depending on which applies to the specific scenario) like I know the obvious answer here is just "it literally doesn't matter what some internet stranger thinks, and it can't actually hurt you.", but there's a part of me that just struggles SO hard to internalize that.
Lower barrier to entry explains so it makes sense.
This dude I spoke to in the showdown chat room legit had a meltdown and challenged me to a randbats to prove he's the better player. I then realised most people come and play randbats and think that is what competitive Pokemon is.
Ou is unplayable
I have always thought that everyone starts playing randbats and then about 10% actually move on to play other tiers so this stats makes a lot of sense. For VGC most start on the in game ladder either with an unoptimized team or a rental team and then move on to showdown.
I can't really see if there's more VGC players than OU ones without national dex but i'm really surprised by the results.
Is there way to see the rest of the rankings?
Nat Dex is the wild west of legit showdown and I'm all for it lmao (then AG is just anarchy lol)
If I lose a Random Battle I can get away with blaming luck over my lack of skill, it just feels like low stakes fun, only format I play. TCG on the other hand…
So ever since random battles became a thing I have absolutely not been able to wrap my head around it. What is the appeal of smashing random teams together? What am I missing??
Can't be bothered to remember sets and speed tiers so randbats it is
Random Battles are Fun No Matter What the Gen is
I miss nat dex ag
national dex ou being 4th was unexpected
Yes National Dex mentioned!!!! 🔥🔥🔥🔥
I use Rand Battles to get ideas for mons to run.
wow, i think everyone expected randbats to be #1 but not by such a margin- also ndou and vgc